In its efforts to pump up the use of PHP for enterprise applications running on the i platform, Zend Technology has announced that it has hired a long-time PHP-on-i advocate, Mike Pavlak, to be part of the Zend team, helping get i shops moving toward deploying PHP for creating new applications and modernizing old ones for the Web. Zend has also hired other i-specific sales and channel managers, and has announced two new partnerships with players in the i ecosystem.

Pavlak, as many of you know, was formerly the IT director at Tripp Lite, a Chicago-based maker of uninterruptible power

It seems like a long time since IBM announced the Power Systems convergence and the new Power6-based Power 520 i Edition 9407-M15, 9408-M25, and 9409-M50 machines, which replace the System i 520, 515, 525, and 550 boxes, which were based on the Power5+ processors. To its credit, Big Blue made a lot of progress in late 2006 with its user-capped Solution Edition Power5+ machines, which were productized as the 515 and 525 with the Power5+ chips in early 2007. The new Power Systems offer further price/performance improvements, but just how much depends on the precise configuration you look at.

As

As a long time watcher of the systems and server area–at least by IT journalism standards, where journos usually burn out after five to 10 years in the field–I take a keen interest in any means of ranking the different platforms of the world. In the absence of truly impartial data, I am always on the lookout for a new way to compare different platforms. For the past couple of weeks, I have been playing around with the Internet’s major search engines to rank various server platform brands, and this week I continue the series, this time looking at what

Think of yourself as the CEO of your life. Your budget, like that of your competitors, is 8,760 hours per year. How do you vote with your time, money, and energy? What do you say “yes” to, and what do you say “no” to? Given all of your different personas (the goof-off, the responsible one, the dreamer, the provider, the visionary, the critic, the good child, etc.), which has controlling interest of the enterprise that is you? Who are the stockholders you are obliged to please? Who sits on your board of directors; and who has veto power? And, if

For all the intense competition in the server and storage space, it is still a pretty good business that, despite the technical training required and tough sales environment, yields plenty of profits for many of the players who peddle IT gear. Of course, the bigger the reseller, the better, since size usually brings breadth as well as depth of coverage. And that is why Dutch IT, communications, and engineering conglomerate Imtech has decided to buy Real Solutions, an IBM systems resellers that has a large presence in the United Kingdom.

Real Solutions, for you students of IT history, was

In case you haven’t noticed, the global economy is about as crazy as the world climate and the state of the Internet. That’s probably a coincidence, even if it might not feel like it.

The Western economies are under pressure thanks to financial shenanigans and the price of energy while Eastern economies are exploding as they have become the manufacturing engines for the world; the Internet is a collection of tens of millions of servers, just this side of controlled chaos and doing great things for us personally as well as for our employers. But the Internet is rife with

Science and technology are recognized as drivers of economic growth, and undoubtedly both will have an increasing role in the future. Certainly individuals will prosper in proportion to their scientific, technological, and engineering talents and we would expect those with computer science and information systems degrees to have excellent career opportunities. How does IBM‘s Power Systems machinery running the i platform fit into this view of the future?

“I talk to people with all different types of systems, and the impression I have is that people expect the System i and the System z to hold their own or

Back in the old days of computing, before there was Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II, HIPAA, and similar regulations that compel companies in various industries or of various persuasions (SOX is about being public) to comply with those regulations that restrict access to systems, files, and data, it was no big deal if system administrators, programmers, and even end users had FTP access to systems. Those days are gone.

And that is why Accellion, a security appliance company that was founded in 1999 in Palo Alto, California, has created a set of eponymous appliances that seek to get employees out of

Midrange ERP software maker Vormittag Associates, of Ronkonkoma, New York, last week announced that it has tapped 360 Vertical Solutions, a specialist in the food services industry, to be a partner to peddle VAI’s S2K Enterprise for Food Distribution software for the i platform.

360 Vertical Solutions is based in Columbus, Georgia, and is an IBM and Intuit business partner, the former gave the company access to and expertise with IBM’s servers (including the System i and Power Systems) and the latter provided expertise in deploying QuickBooks Enterprise on Windows platforms.

VAI is, of course, the maker and

Energized by the successful acquisitions of two companies specializing in RFID solutions Better Online Solutions (BOS) posted hefty increases in both revenue and sales during the first quarter of 2008.

At the October 2007 announcement that his company was purchasing Summit Radio, Shmuel Koren, president and chief executive officer of BOS, called the acquisition “an important addition to BOS’ international activities, especially in the United States.” He wasn’t wrong. He went on to describe Summit’s business as “highly synergetic with the business of our supply chain division” and viewed it as a pathway to “expand supply-chain sales to major international